State Repubs want to throw 65,000 people off Medicaid rolls

The mean season in Wisconsin continues to unfold...

I don't know, friends, when I think about that story the other day about doubling the costs of security for Guv Walker, and when I think about the undemocratic, nearly dictatorial control of the Grover Norquist no-tax-increase crowd - as if this in and by itself is some deep, profound political concept, rather than what it is, a simplistic design to collapse government services in places where they are most needed and for the people who most need them - I wonder more and more how we will like living in a society like the one Walker & Co. are creating - a mean society, a society with escalating numbers of people living in desperation and deprivation, collapsed hopes and dreams.

You certainly know why Walker might feel the kind of paranoia that means more armed protection...

So read this story carefully, if you have not already:

Lawmakers OK changes that could drop 65,000 from Medicaid

You and I know how easy it would be to avoid these cuts made by people who do not have a financial care in the world, who have no fears of losing access to excellent health care, who think it a travesty that anyone thinks they, in their privilege, have any social responsibility in this world in which the wealthy and the corporate giants take more and more of the society's wealth to themselves.

We are in a selfish, mean, season. We are in an unraveling time when it comes to the political culture of this state.

Listen to the cold-hearted cruelty (I don't know how else to name it) hidden in this statement from Walker's State Health Services Secretary Dennis Smith (the position ought to be renamed to something like the drive-more-poor-people-into-poverty-and-illness secretary):

"Under our approach, individuals would lose coverage only if they make the choice not to pay a fair share of their coverage," Smith said, adding later, "We're at least giving people a choice."

Keep in mind who we are talking about here - families that sometimes have to decide between food and medicine, paying the rent or paying the doctor bills. An example from the news story:

For instance, a single parent with two children who makes more than $27,795 a year would typically see his or her annual premiums rise to $1,390 from $120 - a more than tenfold increase. In all, the higher premiums would apply to 91,500 BadgerCare Plus participants - almost two-thirds of them children.

And then when these children go to school, the rightwing Repubs will get all upset if they don't test well!!! And then schools' funding will be in jeopardy and teachers will be blamed - not hunger, not lack of preventive health care, not the poverty into which Repubs are driving more and more of our people.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

For what? So that Wisconsin can become even more 'open for business' than it was before; so that mining companies can get tax breaks to blow open more holes in our countryside; so that more Walmarts can be opened to take advantage of the rising pool of cheap, non-union labor, to staff their stores where more and more poor people undermine their well-being by shopping there because it's all they can afford, which ensures that more poor people will be exploited by companies like Walmart.

That's the world they are creating. It's a world I organized against creating over decades in my work in Washington DC when the US and big corporate 'free-traders' (a misnomer if ever there was one) were doing this to Mexico and Central America. Now it has come home, and how do we like it? Because this is not free trade; this is rigged trade, rigged politics, taking advantage of this strain of fierce individualism that is still way too pervasive in our socio-political culture.

If we don't feel the connection between our lives and the lives of these 65,000 people, then we are living an illusion that will come back to haunt us.

This issue is not over. It now goes to the federal government which must approve it by the end of the year in order for it to go into effect. That means it goes to the President of the United States who can decide that this will not stand. If you care, you could make your voice heard in Washington.

There's another message you could send to your state politicians as well - this whole problem could be resolved with minute tax increases on corporate and individual wealth which that class would hardly feel. They could still vacation in Cancun and buy yachts; they could still afford expensive security details. If we believe they have more right to our public wealth than the poor do, we are a sorry state indeed.

And for all of you BadgerCare advocates out there, all you who provide services to these populations bearing the brunt of the politics of meanness, thank you!! Your work is tireless and often despair-inducing. You see the politics of meanness where it plays out in the lives of real human beings, something that Walker & Co. have intentionally blinded themselves from seeing. And yet you press on, pricking our consciences every day, reminding us that poverty is the underside of an economic/political system for which we are all responsible.

Damage piling up

It is hard not to be discouraged. The damage already done and about to be perpetrated by our state government is considerable and will have permanent ripples across our dear Wisconsin. Last November, by not telling the truth about what they were intending, by not having to disclose their billionaire and corporate backers (thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision), and with only half of voters exercising this precious right, we put in place a state government with no balancing opposition.

And until the Wisconsin 14 made their daring move across the Illinois state line, the Democratic Party could barely muster a credible opposing argument to NO NEW TAXES!! MORE JOBS!!  WISCONSIN IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS!! - that shrill cry of the right used to mask their true intentions.

This is what 'open for business' means. In January when Walker took office and Koch Industries opened their lobbying office in Madison, it meant Walker's people sitting right down with the Koch people to negotiate an easing of restrictions on phosphorous pollution from the Koch's Georgia-Pacific plants into our Wisconsin waterways. Controversial State Supreme Court Judge Prosser was in on this, another indication of the trifecta of rightist power we have in our executive, legislative and judicial branches. Today we also see that it means speeding up the environmental review process for construction of mines, a policy aimed directly at Gogebic Taconie of Hurley, a company bent on opening an iron ore mine Up North.

And just as Koch Industry lobbyists helped craft the easing of the phosphorous pollution restrictions, so, reportedly, did the owner of the mining company, Bill Williams, with the environmental review process. Is this who we want writing our laws? Did you vote for these guys?

This is what it means in Scott Walker's world to be 'open for business:' to allow corporate leaders themselves to write the rules and regulations under which they will operate. Good for their business, really bad for you and me and the quality of life in this state. In this case, in the professed cause of creating jobs - as if environmentally destructive industries are the only ways to create jobs in this state - ecological wreckage will come to yet another corner of our once beautiful state (still beautiful in parts, but that beauty is eroding thanks to these kinds of businesses, developers, golf course operators, industrial farmers, etc. - open for business indeed).

The Dept. of Natural Resources (DNR) is becoming a tool of industry under the Walker regime, certainly not a protection of our precious ecosystems under threat all over the place from road builders and developers, toxic industrial farmers, corporations seeking more nature to exploit for their profit.

Really, I hope this weekend's rally in Madison is about more than collective bargaining rights, more than the threats of the regime to well-compensated middle-class public sector jobs, important as that it. I hope it is about voting rights (about to be severely suppressed), about the gutting of public transportation vital to poor people to get to work, about the racism that underlies so much of this regime's policies, about what it will mean to destroy public education systems under threat by the broadening of the voucher program, about ecology and what it will mean if we continue to toxify and rip apart the ecosystems of our state, its waters, soils, forests, and more.

The ability to push back legislatively does not exist now, and much of the initial damage will be done before recall elections. So where is our leverage? Little in the immediate term. But even in the medium and longer term, in order to turn this course around, it means coming to terms with the rightist assault on our democracy, with the real powers and intentions of the people that put Walker and other rightist state governments in power in nearly half our states. And there is not yet anything approaching the breadth of a movement that is required to resist and overcome this kind of power.

It took 20-30 years for the civil rights movement to accomplish the end of legal segregation and recognition of voting rights for African-Americans in this country. What we lose will have to be won back. And that won't happen in one election cycle.

The great coming-together of all populations under threat right now from this regime hasn't happened yet - but it is the only real power the people have, or have ever had, to defend their rights and their dignity in the face of threats to those rights and to the common good and the goods of the commons, what safeguards the minimum of dignity and well-being for all.

Sen. Johnson wants freedom - for private business, not for you and me

Really, this CPAC gathering is a good thing to avoid if you want to keep your food down. Lots of rightist egos trying to out-conservative each other. Our new Sen. Johnson made his debut going on about 'freedom' and how government is bad, bad, bad, and how we ought to gut every kind of government program that assists those left on the margins of the economy, but give people like him lots of tax breaks.

He says that liberals are fostering entitlement and dependency. I think of stuff like Social Security. I pay into it all my life, how then is it an entitlement? It is actually a well-funded trust that gives me back in my retirement years something of what I paid into it.  I'm not 'entitled:' it's my own money! But by this language they try to wrest SS from the public sector in an attempt to get it into the hands of financial/investment institutions like Goldman Sachs - and we see how well that went - pensions replaced by 401ks that went bust in the great financial meltdown of 2008. Wouldn't you rather have a pension? Who do you want in control of your future savings?

Johnson also earned some fame during his campaign by expressing his disdain for climate science. I love that - when non-scientists with a personal stake in the outcome of research criticize decades worth of studies by real scientists. Anyway, he says the globe is probably warming because of solar activity.


Important to note that his company, the one that makes him a millionaire, is a plastics and polyester manufacturing company, called Pacur LLC. Of course, plastics and polyester use lots of oil. So you can imagine that Johnson would not favor things like carbon taxes or ending tax-payer subsidies to oil companies. That would raise his costs of doing business. Better for his company to debunk climate change science.

Well, there are fewer and fewer jobs in the future of a planet approaching a climate tipping point that will result in catastrophic economic disruptions and collapses. Wise it would be for us to create jobs by planning for a future that moves us off fossil fuels, corn ethanol, and other ecologically damaging industries that are altering the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and biosphere.

We have a hard time learning this lesson, that freedom for business is not the same as freedom for people - like those who work for these companies, or folks trying to create a decent life for themselves and their families. The role of government is not to create the environment for unfettered business, it's to help keep the economic rules fair for everyone, not just CEOs. We have to stop confusing 'open for business' with protecting the well-being of workers, youth, those living in poverty, our elderly relying on the SS into which they paid all their lives. One businessman's 'freedom' can become someone else's unemployment, lower wages, lack of health insurance, environmental damage, and more.

Anyway, Johnson asserted that he wanted to make the Obama agenda disappear. Well, Senator, just a reminder - that's not how democracy works. You don't just get your way.